There Are Celebrities and Then There Are Celebrities

A friend once told me that if you have a huge project ahead of you, plan a trip and schedule it soon after your project is due to be completed. That way you'll have something fun to look forward to at the end of your project. Well, that may work for some, but I'm not one of them. Or maybe my problem is that technically I planned this trip in the middle of my project.

Last week I finally finished my conclusion to my thesis. "Ah, at last" I thought, "I have a full rough draft of my thesis. Now I only need to clean up a few things and send this off to my committe." But then I got some feedback. Most of it was helpful because I realized that I didn't need to make some of the changes I was thinking of, but I also wanted to make the changes suggested before I sent it off to my committee. So, with only a week to work on all of this, I've been focusing all my energies on my thesis (as oppossed to blogging or watching previews on the internet).

This weekend I decided to take a short break and take advantage of the LA Times' Festival of Books. It was pretty cool; there were lots of interesting people including Chewbacca (sans mask) and a guy peddling his levitation theory. There were also several celebrities promoting their books. We weren't able to get down to UCLA until four and the party ended at six, which meant that most of the programs were over at five. The Festival of Books is a combination of panel discussions, for which you have to reserve free tickets, stage presentations open to all comers, and booths full of independent and well known book publishers. We checked the schedule and discovered that really the only stages with anything going on were those for kids.

We tried out the Reading by Nine stage because they were doing storytelling and it wasn't as crowded as the Target Children's Stage, but the guy wasn't that good. When we noticed that Billy Crystal was going to make an appearance on the Target stage in the next fifteen minutes, we decided to brave the crowds for curiosity's sake. I also saw the David Shannon, one of my favorite illustrators was on stage following BC.


Well, to put it bluntly, BC wasn't very interesting. I'm sure his book is fine, but we both couldn't help but feel that Billy took one look at the ginormous line of people waiting for him to sign their books and decided to just do a quick read through of his book. Lucky for me, most everyone was there to see BC. So as soon as he left the stage, the crowds cleared out and we were able to move up for David Shannon. DC didn't just read us his new book, Good Boy, Fergus, but he also explained all sorts of fun details about his book before showing the audience how to draw David. For example, on one of the pages, DC included a picture of his little girl because she asked if she could be in his book. He just seemed to understand the audience better. When he explained how to draw David, he said, "His head is a circle, but not a perfect circle. So don't trace a plate when drawing David's head." DC also explained why David's eyes are uneven (DC's eyes are uneven and he showed us all) and why his left nostril is bigger than his right (he's left handed).

I know BC is a great entertainer, but DC was clearly more interested in being there and sharing with the audience.